We’re expanding our inventory and have a ton of new samples to try (we mean it; there must be at least 50 100 items on our shelves waiting to be tasted!) We have everything from chocolate to pickles to hot sauce to walnut oil…but we’re going to need some help tasting it all.

We’d like to invite a blogger or two to taste some samples and help us choose which new products we should carry…and we’ll also pour you some tasty cocktails while we’re at it. We’ll shut down the office early on a Friday afternoon – we’re aiming for June 1 – and we’ll

2. If you’ve got step 1 down: articulate a flavor profile for an ingredient of your choice from the list provided below and post your thoughts in a comment on this blog post by Friday, 5/25 (my birthday) ;). You are free to choose more than one ingredient if you’re inspired to do so.

3. We’ll pick a couple local bloggers with the best flavor profiles to join our tasting party.

4. Come join the Marx Foods staff at our office on Friday, June 1 to sample the goods.

Choose at least 1 ingredient from the list below for your flavor profile:

Mango, thinly sliced, with sliced almonds and creme fraiche ice cream, maybe with some coconut for good measure in a parfait. If skipping ice cream, coconut sticky rice mango ‘nigiri’ with almonds for garnish.

Fresh peaches sliced in half and grilled with butter and brown sugar (or brown butter for more delicate peaches), with a bourbon-brown sugar caramel sauce, straight or with vanilla ice cream. Add fresh thyme if skipping the sauce, but keep the ice cream either way.

Peaches and thyme muddled into an agua fresca.

Asparagus. Grilled with olive oil, topped with sea salt. They had this at Bitterroot and it was more addictive than their fries.

First of all it seems that people didn’t understand that when you said “flavor profile” you meant a description of each ingredient’s flavor, and NOT an example of a recipe that would utilize that ingredient.

So with that in mind, here are my flavor profiles:

1. Eggplant tastes like a big bland purple schlong. That’s if it’s cooked correctly. If cooked INCORRECTLY it tastes like slimy and bitter. Like your mom.

2. Asparagus is possibly the best vegetable on earth. These crisp, fresh vegetable dicks are like springtime itself, condensed into delicious springtime erections. And to all those people who don’t like asparagus because it makes your pee smell weird: grow the fuck up.

3. Mango is somehow sweet and peppery. This unlikely flavor combination is surprisingly refreshing. The only problem with mango is that it is WAY TOO DIFFICULT TO PEEL: the flesh of the mango feels like it;s made of K-Y Jelly, and there’s a fibrous pit in the very center of this frictionless fruit which much be perilously removed with a very sharp knife. 99% of the time your mango-peeling experience will end with your fingers bloodied and the slippery, oblong piece of fruit you were trying to peel sliding off the counter onto the floor.

4. Roasted chicken is a thing of beauty: with its crisp golden skin, plump breasts and juicy thighs, a perfectly roasted chicken is like a sunbathing coed. But don’t roast just any lame grocery store chicken, otherwise it will taste like, uh, chicken. Instead, get a chicken that lived its life to the fullest, and went to bullfights, and wrote novels and shit. If the chicken lived a proper life it will, to paraphrase Bernard Loiseau, still have a little whiff of the barnyard in it.

5. Tomatoes, in this country at least, are tragic losers. Most of the time they taste like watery sacks, as if they were the Willy Loman of vegetables. But for a couple months in late summer tomatoes come into their own: sweet as a 1966 Chevelle SS and as enthusiastically juicy as a 30- year- old divorcee.

6. Regianno is one of the world’s best cheeses. It’s dry, almost astringent, in fact, nutty, and sharp, with little crunchy crystalline pockets here and there. These crystals are made of PURE FLAVOR.

7.Almonds are, uh, almond-flavored. Believe it or not, what makes an almond delicious is actually a trace of cyanide. So now you know: delicious things are deadly.

8. Thyme has a refreshing woodsy scent and a delicate flavor. Indispensable as a key component of the bouquet garni, thyme can be used to flavor anything from soups, meat, fish, and even desserts, if you’re the kind of weirdo who enjoys savory desserts.

9. Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. This doesn’t make much sense, because it doesn’t actually have that much of a taste, and besides is usually paired with other herbs like garlic that overpower saffron’s fragile grassy flavor. What saffron CAN do is stain any dish an appealing, sunny yellow color. Is the color yellow worth $700 an ounce? Only your conscience can decide that for you.

10. Brown sugar is absolutely vital in baking, where it confers the dark flavor of molasses to any baked good. It is also the Rolling Stones’ most racist song. I hope you’re proud of yourselves, you British racists.

11. Shiitake mushrooms are very savory, mostly because of all the amino acids and shit. But be careful: they sport a woody stem, much like a 7th grader watching Cinemax.

12. Peanut butter is an ingredient which many people pretend to be allergic to. It’s also the main component of two of the three best Halloween candies.

13. Soy Sauce is salty, savory, and umami as fuck. As with almonds, soy sauce can be dangerous to your health: it contains percent levels of the potentially toxic compound dihydrogen monoxide, which means that if you inhale too much soy sauce, it will kill you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. The Kikkoman lobby has deep pockets and is trying to keep this vital information away from consumers.

I can handle being reminded that I should not mix food and linear regression. Cake != variance(Frosting), etc.

Brown sugar. Sweet, occasionally cloyingly so, with that heady hit of molasses, and caramel if I don’t leave the bag/jar open overnight. If I take the time to make a batch in the food processor, there’s usually a strong background of licorice. But I’m not sure it’s worth that amazing aroma to have to clean molasses off the food processor’s blade later.

We have chosen our guest taster! We picked Surly Gourmand because of the length and ambitiousness of his post…he took on each ingredient we listed and was extremely enthusiastic in his descriptions, so that’s part of the reason why we chose him.

We’re looking forward to our tasting day (which has been moved to Friday 6/15) and we can’t wait to share our soon-to-be new products with all of you.